Interview by Deborah Vail
I met Dr. Sonja Boon at a recent writing retreat in Trinity, Newfoundland organized by editor Allyson Latta. The official launch of her memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (WLU Press, 2019) was just days away and as we hiked the Gun Hill Trail to take in the spectacular view, we talked about multiculturalism, difficult histories, archives, family and the importance of memory. Here are some highlights from our conversation.
Deborah Vail: How does it feel to have your memoir published? What are some of the positive and negative spin offs of having your story out there?
Sonja Boon: It’s a total thrill, but also simultaneously overwhelming. What the Oceans Remember is much more personal, much more intimate than any book I’ve previously written. I’ve lived with this story for so long, in so many different forms. Wilfrid Laurier University Press took such good care of this story; everyone at the Press has been so very wonderful to work with! I couldn’t have asked for a better publishing experience. The book itself is such a gorgeous object, a beautiful “thing.” I still can’t quite believe it when I look at it.
DV: The title, What the Oceans Remember, is alluring. For me, it suggests vast experiences and haunting revelations. Why did you choose this title and what does it mean to you?
SB: I love the idea of vastness and haunting! Both of those are in the title, but I don’t know that I would have articulated things in that way before you mentioned it.
Choosing a title for this book was a real challenge. Usually I’m quick with titles, but this one wouldn’t come. I knew it needed water in it because I wanted somehow to capture both the endlessness, spaciousness, and generosity of water, and the hidden stories, griefs, silences, and violences. I also wanted to get a sense of the connectedness of the oceans, and of the stories that happen on and in oceans. When I’m standing on the shores at Middle Cove Beach, about ten minutes’ drive from our house in St. John’s, I’m thinking of other shores and other waters: the mudbanks in Suriname, the white sands in Vlissingen, the wind and waves around the Cape of Good Hope—and the lives and stories of the enslaved and indentured. The ocean also carries material histories: in Trinity, Newfoundland, I have found shards of early twentieth-century pottery, pieces of eighteenth-century smoking pipes, and even a couple of mid-twentieth-century spark plugs. Debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan has washed onto shores along North America’s west coast. Notes slipped into bottles here in Newfoundland have travelled to Ireland, Lego keeps washing up in Cornwall. I wonder about how water moves around the globe, and how water’s migrations might also mirror my own family’s migrations.
One thing that living near the ocean has taught me is that beyond human stories, the ocean has its own stories, its own agency. Middle Cove Beach changes with every tide, every storm. Stones and stories tumble with the waves. The shoreline shifts, moves. The mood changes. Water is about constant movement. The ocean is alive, and it is moving and sprawling. One of the manuscript reviewers pointed me to Renisa Mawani’s Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke UP, 2018). In that book, Mawani considers oceans as method, using the different currents as a way of capturing the different layers of the story of the Komagata Maru and its oceanic crossings. It was a perfect recommendation, because I was trying to do something similar. In What the Oceans Remember, I wanted to get at how these layers play in and through and against one another in relation both to my family histories and to some of the larger questions that structure the book. I’m not only interested in “Where is home?” and “What does it mean to belong?” but also: “What are the afterlives of complicated histories of migration, oppression, and violence?” and further, “What responsibilities do we—all of us—hold in relation to such stories?”
DV: What advice can you offer anyone wanting to access archives as part of their autoethnographic research?
SB: A couple of things: First and foremost, make friends with archivists: they hold the keys to the kingdom, and they can roll out the red carpet for you. And for the most part they’re genuinely friendly and welcoming and happy to find others who share their passion. Secondly, open out your search. Don’t just look for the names of your family members. Look around them, too. Sometimes you have to work your way in sideways; there’s no direct route to what you’re looking for. And sometimes that sideways route opens up new questions and new possibilities that you’d never imagined. Take, for example, the Liverpool-based ship, Kate Kellock. In late 1873, it transported over 400 indentured labourers from Calcutta to Suriname, among them two of my ancestors. But on an earlier journey, it was fitted with fine accommodations to bring Australians from Melbourne to England. A very different clientele. A very different kind of journey. And because I was able to juxtapose both sets of records (along with a few more), new questions percolated to the surface. Who was travelling? Why were they travelling? What did it mean for the same captain to transport such different groups of people? What were social relations like aboard the ship? How did crew and clients—whether wealthy Australians or British Indian indenturees interact with one another? Had I only searched for the 1873/74 Calcutta-Suriname journey I might not have asked those questions at all. The story—and my understanding—are much richer for them.
DV: You open your memoir with the following words. “Archives are seductive places. In their vaults, they hold the dreams and longings of those who have come before us. Their reading rooms, meanwhile, gather the hopes of all the researchers who have ever come through their doors in search of the fleeting truths of the past. Archives are places where a seeker’s dreams can come true, but also where they can be shattered.” While working on your memoir, can you give examples of how your dreams were shattered or when the archives helped a dream come true?
SB: One of my closest childhood friends lived in an old brick house on an acreage outside of town. I loved that house because it had an attic that periodically yielded treasures like letters to former residents. The property also had a tiny fenced-in family cemetery with a few headstones dating back decades to earlier settlers. Our attic, by contrast, had pink fibreglass insulation. It goes without saying that we didn’t have a tiny family cemetery. To put it more simply: Our house had no stories; her house had all the stories. As a child who lived in my imagination (particularly through books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery, and Frances Hodgson Burnett), I was jealous. Very jealous, actually. I wanted an attic filled with stories, a graveyard to call my own.
Working in the archives is the next best thing: I get to borrow someone’s attic and play in it for a while. It’s an immense privilege to work with archival materials, to become intimate with the voices of those who lived before me. In our time together, I read, listen, think, dream, learn.
In some ways What the Oceans Remember is a love letter to archives and to archival research. It’s about archival voices but even more about archival silences; that is, about the gaps in the historical record, what we do with them, how we navigate them, how we respond to them. And in this way, it’s inevitably about speculation: what stories reside in the spaces between the records?
When I’m thinking of shattered dreams, I’m thinking of how researchers enter into archival spaces. We know that we’re not supposed to have preconceived notions of what we’ll encounter or what any of it will mean, but inevitably we do. We’ve already spent countless hours mapping out projects, thinking through conceptual frameworks, figuring out where we need to be and why. We’ve got goals. So many goals. While archival collections can sometimes be generous, they can equally be recalcitrant. Sometimes the material just isn’t there. Sometimes it tells something completely different from what we hoped. And sometimes we don’t even realize what we’d been hoping for until it’s not there. I think that’s how it was for me in relation to visiting the archives of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC), a trading (and slaving) company based in the Dutch province of Zeeland. I’m not even sure what exactly I was hoping for, what I thought I would find. What I do know is that working with these materials left me with an immense sense of grief. Not because the records were sparse. Quite the contrary. The records are voluminous and unbelievably rich: they give researchers a detailed look at the business aspects of a powerful slave trading company in the eighteenth century. But for all their riches, they include nothing about the subjectivity of the enslaved. And really, when you think about it, of course they don’t. Why I would I have even expected them to? But somehow, I did. Somehow, I thought there would at least have been hints, fragments, shadows. But there weren’t. There was nothing. And it’s that contradiction between richness and nothingness that gnawed at me: the too-muchness of the slave trade made the silence of the enslaved that much louder.
But there were also moments of archival bliss. My grandfather, for example, lived on another continent and died when I was six, so I never got to know him and don’t really remember him at all. Following his musical career through Surinamese newspapers was an absolute thrill and delight, not just because he started to come alive, but because it allowed me to reflect on my own life as a classical musician. Those memories aren’t just about concerts and performances and musical communities, they’re also inside my body: about how it feels to play the flute, about the emotional resonance of music. Reflecting, thinking, and feeling brought me much closer to this man I never really got the opportunity to know.
DV: If it were possible, which one of your ancestors would you like to travel back in time to converse with? What questions would you ask and what would you thank them for?
SB: I thank my ancestors at the end of my acknowledgements. I thank them because without them I would not be, and this story wouldn’t be either. Although I don’t say it explicitly, I want to thank them not only for surviving, but for living. For thriving. For believing, somehow, somewhere, that things might get better, that their stories would continue.
Because of the nature of colonial archives, I don’t know how my ancestors lived their lives, how and why they made the decisions they made, what they were thinking and dreaming, what they wanted for themselves, their families, their communities. And those are the questions I’d want to ask them. If I could sit down with some of them, I’d want to know about their daily lives, and how they managed them. I’d want the everydayness of their life stories: the contradictions, the messiness, the anguish, the survival instinct, the selfishness, the love, the rage, the passion. All the stuff of being human.
DV: What do you want readers to take away from your story, especially those who do not belong to a minority or underrepresented group? What responsibility do we have to difficult histories such as the slave trade?
We are all inheritors of these histories. It doesn’t matter who we are. We are all living in worlds created and shaped by these histories. That can feel uncomfortable. It’s deeply unsettling. But that’s the point. We can’t begin to move forward unless we acknowledge this. I’m going to draw on the words of Toronto-based visual artist Camille Turner. Turner curates the Afronautic Research Lab, what she calls a “counter archive” that seeks to reveal colonial Canadian links to the transatlantic slave trade. In August 2019, she was a featured artist at the Bonavista Biennale, where her installation looked at Newfoundland’s links to the transatlantic slave trade. Interviewed by CBC NL this past August, she had this to say: “We didn’t create this history. None of us did. We weren’t here, but it is what shaped us. By not dealing with it, we can never move on from here. We can’t really move into a future where things are equitable. So, I think it’s really important to acknowledge these stories.”
DV: You describe the day you became a Canadian citizen and how at the welcoming ceremony you felt different from other new Canadians because each one of your family members was from a different place. How successful do you think the idea of multiculturalism is within Canada?
This is a question that could go on for hours and days and months and years. I’m currently working on an essay with a student about this very topic. The short answer is that multiculturalism is an emotional thing for me. When we arrived in Canada in 1975, multiculturalism as official government policy was all shiny and brand new. And it mattered a lot to a young mixed-race kid growing up in a very white prairie town where you could count racialized families on one hand. Multiculturalism is where I found a home for myself as a child. It helped me make some kind of sense of myself in a space that didn’t quite know how to make sense of someone like me. Even today, I have all the feels when I visit the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax, Every. Single. Time. (I’ve visited at least three times.).
But having all the feels is, of course, not enough. I know that while multiculturalism has promised a lot and given a lot, there are many silences. A multicultural framework within bilingualism can never truly be multiculturalism. It is unwieldy, lumpy, and fraught with contradictions. Nor can a multiculturalism premised on hyphens respond well to complexities beyond binaries. There are also many valid critiques to make about a feel good national (and global) branding exercise that doesn’t take up the reality of structural racism and its effects. And let’s not forget that multiculturalism, as framed in government policy, was never really imagined with Indigenous peoples in mind. Whose interests does “we are all immigrants” serve?
I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to let go of multiculturalism; it is so deeply intimate for me and so much a part of how I came to be in Canada. I think that as an ideal, it has much to offer, but almost fifty years later, there’s still a lot we haven’t worked through in terms of how it actually operates on the ground. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
DV: Has your memoir sufficiently answered the questions, where do I belong and to whom? Do you believe you will ever feel at home in one specific geographical location?
SB: Can a single book sufficiently answer a question? Ultimately, I think the book is part of a journey towards understanding. It has given me a context, I think, and that’s what I was missing. I knew there was a history of slavery. I knew there was a history of indentured labour. I knew there was a German mining company spokesperson. I knew there was a Chinese man, a goldsmith and merchant. But I didn’t have a bigger historical, geographic, political, and theoretical picture to fit all of this into, and now I do. That matters. Not just for me, but also for others whose histories are complicated and who are trying to figure out what those histories mean in the present day.
Will I ever feel at home in one location? That’s another question altogether. I’ve moved around a lot, and like others who have moved a lot, I’ve not only left bits of myself behind, but have also gathered bits of those places into myself. There is nothing better than the low horizon of the prairies, and that warm prairie wind. But there is also nothing better than the cold wind off the ocean, with its hint of tanginess (I rely on it to do my hairstyling for me). There is also nothing better than to bite into a fresh krentenbol while walking along cobbled streets. Nor is there anything better than the feel of those streets under my feet. There’s nothing better than hearing the lilt of Surinamese Dutch, because it evokes so many family memories. Nothing better than the sticky sweat of a hot day near the equator. There’s nothing better than sitting in a joggling English train eating chocolate Hobnobs. And nothing better than making music with friends in four languages.In other words, I think that ultimately home is the patchwork of all of these things together. It can never be in one place, and that’s okay.
DV: Your memoir was published through the Life Writing Series, Wilfred Laurier University Press. What can you tell us about this series and your new role as editor?
SB: The Life Writing series was initiated by Marlene Kadar, a giant in life writing studies not just in Canada, but in the life writing world over. The series brings together critical research on life writing and hybrid works of life writing. That is to say, it’s about life writing as a scholarly practice, with researchers interested in how to understand, theorize, analyze life writing in its myriad forms, and it’s also about bringing that critical lens into conversation with the creative impulses of memoir and creative non-fiction.
It’s the scholarly end of things that first brought me to the series—I own a number of the books published in the series, have assigned some, and have read several others. So, for example, I still very much cherish Marlene Kadar and Helen Buss’ edited collection, Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents, and have read and recommended its more recent partner, Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (ed. Linda Morra and Jessica Schagerl). The notion of the “autobiographical trace” (from the edited collection, Tracing the Autobiographical), framed an earlier research project I worked on, and still haunts this current work. In more recent years, I’ve also started picking up the more memoir and memoir-like works, notably Allen Smutylo’s The Memory of Water and Kathleen Venema’s Bird-Bent Grass.
When I came aboard last year, we revamped the description a bit to respond not only to changing academic currents (which were already being reflected in the publications, but not in series description), but also to the emergence of more hybrid forms, like What the Oceans Remember, and the complex ways in which we tell and understand life stories. We’re deeply committed to the multiplicity of voices and experiences in this place called Canada, and particularly in those that have been, as we put it in our description, “under- or misrepresented in scholarly work.”
Although I regularly review article and book manuscripts, I’ve never been in an editorial role with a press. So far, it’s been fantastic. The team at WLU Press is fantastic to work with (this is my plug for submitting to WLU Press—if a manuscript fits the mandate, they will care not only for your work, but for you, through every stage of the process!). I’ve already seen some intriguing manuscripts and proposals, which I hope to see more of through revision, peer review, and then the publication processes.
Sonja Boon is an award-winning writer, researcher, flutist, and teacher. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Geist, The Ethnic Aisle, and donttalktomeaboutlove.org, is forthcoming in Room and in two collections. In 2018, she received the Marina Nemat Award from the Creative Writing Program, University of Toronto Continuing Studies. As a flutist, Sonja has performed around the world, from a command performance for the Crown Prince of Japan, to appearing as a soloist with the Toronto Symphony and performances at the Utrecht Early Music Festival. For six years she was principal flutist with the Portland Baroque Orchestra.
Deborah Vail writes fiction, creative non-fiction and book reviews. Her review of Sonja Boon’s, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review.